


when my cage is by the window (i can see the sun)

by Mikkal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Eventual Fluff, Flashbacks, Found Family, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, PTSD, Post-Season/Series 01, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, misuse of quintessence lore (lore-ish)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-24 19:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7520686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkal/pseuds/Mikkal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wormhole destabilized and the paladins are scattered across the universe. </p><p>Hunk and Shiro land on the same planet, against all odds, and Hunk thinks they've got the best outcome they could've gotten. That is, until he actually finds Shiro and learns that, not only is he injured from crash landing, but the wound he received from the witch lady is a lot worse than he thought it would be.</p><p>It's killing Shiro and they're a long way from the Castle of Lions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when my cage is by the window (i can see the sun)

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen fics with Keith and Shiro on the same planet together post-season 1 and I've seen fics for Lance and Shiro too. I couldn't decide between Pidge and Hunk, but somehow Hunk took over, so he gets to be the one!

“Does it waken?”

“Stop that, don’t touch it. It came from the sky; it might be diseased.”

            “’m not diseased,” Hunk mumbles. His head hurts and his mouth is dry, tiny sharp some things dig into his back. He cracks open an eye then immediately closes it again when the sun proves too much to handle. “Who do you think you are, calling me ‘diseased?’”

            He hears shuffling around, hushed whispering in a language so quiet his translator can’t pick it up. He groans, shifting, winces when the some things dig deeper. The fact he’s still wearing his armor makes it worse because that means there’s more weight being pressed on rocks, or sticks, as his body sags towards the ground with gravity.

            …wait…armor…

            “ _Zarkon_!” he gasps, shooting up. His head spins, his stomach rolls, and, when he finally forces his eyes open, his vision swims.

            Hunk glances wildly around for advancing Galran soldiers, only to see…nothing. Well, not nothing, just nothing _terrifying_. Instead he get’s a picture of fluffy green trees, long grass, bright pink flowers, a glowing white sun, and two little creatures a few feet away.

            One’s brown, the other is black. They’re the size of his head and covered in soft-looking fur. There’s a series of curved lines on their forehead, starting small and getting longer. Seven of them, in the colors of the rainbow starting with red at the bottom and violet at the top. Their ears are long and zig-zagged, ending in black loops at the tips and the ears too have the seven colors of the rainbow lining them, except in little same-size dots along the outside of each ear.

            They are _adorable_.

            But he doesn’t focus on that.

            Hunk pulls off his helmet and presses a hand to his head, willing the pounding headache away. Where is he? How’d he get here? ….where’s everyone else? All he remembers is storming Zarkon’s HQ for Allura and then Shiro losing the Black Lion, Keith fighting Zarkon, Witch Haggar, Shiro getting hurt then getting his Lion back…them all escaping through a wormhole.

            Except they didn’t. The wormhole shook and changed colors, Hunk had felt a _force_ pulling him out and a way from the Castle of Lions. He faintly remembers seeing the other Lions get scattered as well before his vision went purple and he went flying through unknown space.

            And now he’s here…on an unknown planet.

            There are too many unknowns here for comfort.

            “What are it?” the brown creature asks. Its voice is high and soft, like a child. His translator audibly whirls a little, meaning the language this creature speaks is an uncommon one.

            _That’s_ a loaded question.

            He coughs, clearing his throat. “I’m Hunk. I’m a Paladin of Voltron.” Straight to the point, no stuttering. Score for Hunk. “What are _you_?”

            The brown one, obviously the braver one, puffs out a little. “Crissen is Crissen!” It nudges the black one. “Jessin is Jessin!”

            “Nice to meet…Crissen and Jessin,” he says. He was going to say ‘nice to meet _you_ ’ but he noticed the way it said only ‘it’ to refer to him and their names to refer to themselves. ‘What are it?’ instead of ‘what are you?’  He’d already asked then ‘what are you’ so lets insult the natives only once today, please. “It’s nice to meet Crissen and Jessin,” he repeats a little more smoothly.  “Where am I?”

            “Pirden!” Crissen says. “Crissen and Jessin are Sea Bunnies.” Jessin almost seems shy, half hiding behind Crissen. “Hunk came from the sky! In a giant thing. What is it?”

            “A giant thing?” he repeats, curling up on his knees to lean forward. “What did it look like? A cat?”

            Crissen wrinkles its face. “What is…a cat?”

            Hunk winces. Oh, great, barriers. “Um…” He pats his armor, looking for his mini drive. It should be hooked—ah-ha! He pulls it out and presses the small blue button. It blinks at him then produces a small hologram of the Yellow Lion. “It looks like this. I fell to Pirden in it. Does Crissen and Jessin know where it went?”

            “Oh! Crissen does know where the Cat is.” The brown Sea Bunny bounces, its ears flopping. “Behind Hunk, look behind.”

            He whirls around (ignoring the nausea) and, sure enough, the Yellow Lion is crouched in the tree line, hidden from immediate sight. He raises an eyebrow, eyeing the hiding spot. That’s not…that’s not exactly the best place if someone was looking from above. There’s a soft noise in the back of his mine, like a half-annoyed, half-amused purr—like the Lion is fully aware how futile her hiding is.

            Hunk has never been so relieved to feel his connection to his Lion before. She must’ve been waiting for him.

            “There is another,” Jessin pips up suddenly. It cowers a little when Hunk turns back to the Sea Bunnies, but it takes a deep breath and puffs out like Crissen had done earlier. Hunk kind of just wants to cuddle them but refrains, his heart hammering too fast at the news of one of the other Paladins making it near him. “Hunk fell in the yellow cat. Another fell in a black one with wings! Over yonder, just near the Tree.”

            Shiro! Oh thank you, thank you. He nearly cries in the relief. To be honest, he’d cry if anyone else he knew had been on this planet with him. He just doesn’t want to be alone.

            He glances around, eyeing anything that could be considered important enough to just be called ‘the Tree.’ He turns around and, duh, finds it. It really is a Tree. As big as an Earth mountain with wide spread branches and the same fluffy green leaves as the surrounding smaller trees (lower case ‘t’). A rainbow of flowers dot in clusters among the leaves, giving it a weird video-game mushroom pattern.

            And a faint cloud of smoke drifts next to the massive truck.

            His heart sinks. Oh no.

            Hunk scrambles for his helmet. “I thank Crissen and Jessin for watching me while I slept and for pointing the black cat out to me. But I need to go now.”

It’s hard to follow their speech patterns as he frantically locks the clasp of his helmet and hooks the mini drive back to his armor. He knows he’s messing it up by saying ‘I’ and ‘me,’ but now all he can think about is the sickeningly purple glow on Shiro’s side from Haggar’s attack and the possible injuries of a crashing Lion. Yellow must’ve spit him out when they landed, an automatic ejection when they hit ground. Who knows if Black did that for Shiro, and even though Hunk met the nice Sea Bunnies, doesn’t mean Shiro met equally friendly natives.

“Hunk is most welcomed,” Crissen says, smiling.

“Most interesting thing to happen to Jessin and Crissen in a long time,” Jessin adds, giggling. Now that he has to leave, Jessin finally seems to warm up to him. Of course. Maybe he could come back sometime?

He shakes his head, smiling a small smile. “Can Hunk visit later? Crissen and Jessin can meet Hunk’s friends.”

“Crissen and Jessin would like that a lot,” Crissen says. “Good luck, Hunk.”

They’re gone only a minute later, their ears twitching. The farther they get the less his translator can hear and switch to Earth-English. He watches them go for only a second before he starts jogging to Yellow.

He doesn’t even attempt to contact Shiro until he’s in his Lion, knowing full well he’s going to need Yellow’s power and range to get through the damage. For the most part it looks like she suffered only cosmetic damage, the control panels that aren’t holographic are fine and the holograms that pop up are intact and seemingly accurate. The ejection was an automatic emergency response then, not the result of actual failure. That’s good.

Hunk takes a deep breath, feeling a twinge in his chest that, ow, actually kind of hurts (Yellow tells him it’s only bruised, not broken so that’s good), but when he lets out the breath he feels a little calmer, a little steadier.

Okay, okay. Everything’s going to be fine. If anyone can get them out of here it’s Shiro.

 

* * *

 

 

 The closer he gets the Tree, the less he believes everything is going to be okay.

            With a sinking heart he eyes the deep gouge in the tree line, dark and smoking. The Black Lion is on it’s side, smoke billowing from a couple joints and one of the eyes cracked.

            “Shiro, do you read me?” he tries. There’s no answer. “Shiro?”

            Static is his only answer. He tries not to let that get to him. Maybe his helmet is damaged (but if his helmet’s damaged then he could have a head wound and that’s not good), maybe he made it out of the Lion and took off his helmet? Or is still in the Lion, took off his helmet, and the communications in the Lion are broken? Oh man, he could go on forever with the possibilities and most of them aren’t happy ones.

            Hunk sets the Yellow Lion as close to Black as possible, taking deep controlled breaths or else he’s going to truly panic. Yellow purrs at him, comforting, before turning her attention back to getting Black to stand up or look at them or _something_.

            He climbs out of Yellow, grabbing a med kit on the way out. He has no idea how he’s going to tell if Shiro is in Black. If she’s not responding to Yellow, she’d definitely not going to respond to Hunk.

            Turns out he doesn’t have to worry about it, because Black’s mouth is already hanging open and he can see indistinct footprints leading away from here into the tree line.

            Hunk presses his lips together, worry blooming from where it’d been sitting in his chest and making it hard to breathe. He leaves Yellow there to continue coaxing Black and follows the footprints the best he can. Some of them are just long, shallow gouges in the dirt, like Shiro had dragged his feet as he walked.

Stumbled, staggered. Those are probably better words for what Shiro had done.

“Shiro!” he calls out, quieter than he’d like, but who knows what shares this planet with Seas Bunnies like Crissen and Jessin. “Shiro!”

He makes it about a hundred feet into the shadow of trees before he loses sight of the foot prints. Hunk slams on the brakes, clutching the med kit to his chest, and glances around in a full circle. Shiro couldn’t be in the trees, the branches might be numerous but they’re all very, very thin. Definitely not sturdy enough to handle the weight of a full-grown man, especially a full-grown man with a Galran tech arm that weighs about half of him.

“Shiro?” he hisses.

Trees, trees everywhere. The only large enough space where there aren’t trees is a tangle of undergrowth that it probably the home of some terrible predator. But, hey, if the footprints mean anything, that’s the best place to find Shiro.

Hunk summons his Bayard, keeping it in the contained form (he knows how to use it finally, but it can be unwieldy sometimes in situations like this), and inches closer to the undergrowth, eyeing it. He can’t see any spot where Shiro could’ve wormed his way in, especially if he’s injured.

Oh, wait. Okay, now he can see it. Shifting to the side he sees a thinner part of the tangle, some branches broken and others bent at weird angles like someone had moved them back to place. There’s a faint blue glow in the shadows, duller than it normally is, but Hunk nearly cries and drops to his knees at the sight.

In fact, he actually does drop to his knees, putting the med kit to the side so he can make a bigger hole in the under bush.

“Wow, you’ve found yourself a really like hide-a-hole,” he comments casually. No, he does _not_ worry about the non-reaction to that. “Damn, Shiro. How’d you do this?”

All that answers him is heavy panting, his breathing labored. The more Hunk makes it into the hole, the more he smells sickness in the air. Not the puke-kind of sickness, but a general unease. He can’t tell if it’s an actual smell, or that weird connection that’s been forming between all five of them because of their prolonged time as Voltron.

Whatever it is, it’s telling him it’s not good.

“Come on, buddy,” Hunk says. “Talk to me. Say anything.”

Still nothing.

Hunk finally makes enough of a hole that sunlight streams through the shadows. He wills his Bayard away and crawls half in, sitting back on his heels the best he can. It’s then that he finally gets a good look at Shiro and, oh man, oh man, this is _not good._

He’s curled up farthest away from the entrance, against a tree trunk, his knees tucked up and his neck bowed. His cybernetic right arm is stretched out away from his body while his left is wrapped around his stomach. At one point his hand had been pressed to his side, but now it hangs limply over his hip. Blood drenches the side of his face, helmet gone, his chest barely moves, something sound clogged in his throat.

The worst part of it, though, is the open wound on his side. Long, jagged claw marks, bleeding and dark. Hunk shifts to the side to let some light on it and gags when he spots the black spidery threads crawling from the wound like roots of a weed. He blocks the light again, unable to bare looking at it, and it’s then that he sees the soft glow of purple from deep inside the wounds.

Quintessence.

Worse: _corrupted_ quintessence.

Hunk shuffles in, dragging the med kit behind him, and carefully moves Shiro’s hand away from the wound a little more. Sweat drenches his face and stains his black under armor, Shiro’s pale cheeks are flushed with a fever, his brows furrowed in the middle. He’s in pain, and Hunk can’t do anything about it.

He pats Shiro’s jaw lightly. “I need you to wake up,” he says softly. “Shiro, please, wake up.” He taps a little harder. “ _Shiro!_ ”

Shiro starts, jerking with a loud cry of pain, his right arm swinging up on the defense. Hunk dodges the blow, breaking through the under bush and getting tangled in it way too easily for his liking.

            Well, he’s definitely not doing that again. What the hell was he thinking? He _knows_ better than to wake someone up like that, especially someone who’s gone through what Shiro’s gone through in the last year and a half.

            Shiro stands, braced defensively, his hand glowing, chest heaving, eyes wild—they flit around, looking for danger, never landing on anything and just simply passing over Hunk like he’s not even there. There’s even more blood down his face and now Hunk can see his left shoulder is a little off-kilter.

            Hunk raises his hands, palms flat towards him. “Easy there,” he says, voice a little wobbly. He could never be scared of Shiro; they all joke about how he’s _Space Dad_. But after what that witch lady did to him? Who knows. “Easy,” he repeats. “It’s just me, Shiro. It’s just Hunk.”

            He stares at him unseeing for a long moment, but, then, his eyes slowly focus, his arm lowers ever-so-slightly. His face pales even more, his shoulders slumping. “Hunk?” he says, voice soft and raspy, barely there and sounding oh-so lost.

            “Hey, yeah.” Hunk clambers to his feet, arms out. Shiro looks like he’s going to drop any moment. “You’re looking at him.”

            “Hunk,” he repeats. His eyelids flutter and his knees buckle.

            “Whoa!”

            Hunk lunges forward and barely catches Shiro in time, dropping to the ground as he’s faced unexpectedly with all of Shiro’s weight. Shiro’s forehead is burning from where it’s pressed in the crook of Hunk’s neck, his hair damp. His breathing is whistling, wheezing.

            He smushes his cheek against Shiro’s head, closing his eyes against the overwhelming helplessness crashing into him. Something tells him the Garrison’s field medical classes did not prepare him for a moment like this.

            Shiro whimpers quietly, his whole body trembling. Yellow rumbles behind them, worried for them and the still unresponsive Black Lion. Hunk hefts Shiro into a more comfortable position, resigned to dragging the Black Paladin to their Lions even though he doesn’t want to be that rough.

            Understatement of the last ten-thousand years: this isn’t good. Not good at all.

**Author's Note:**

> the sea bunnies are based off the sea bunnies from spritelings.com! I got one at Fredcon over the weekend and I've fallen in love. (mine's white)


End file.
